The present invention generally relates to paintball guns, and more particularly relates to bulk loader apparatus used in the sequential gravity feeding of a stored supply of paintballs to the infeed opening of a paintball gun.
The game of paintball has enjoyed great success in recent years and is one in which two or more "military" teams try to capture one another's flags. The players on the teams each carry a CO.sub.2 -powered gun that shoots paintballs--gelatin covered spherical capsules, about the size of bath oil beads, which contain a colored liquid. When a player is hit with a paintball from an adversary's gun, the paintball ruptures and leaves a colored "splat" on the hit player who is then "out" and must leave the game.
As the game of paintball has grown in sophistication, semiautomatic paintball guns--guns that sequentially fire individual paintballs as fast as the trigger can be repeatedly pulled--have become more prevalent. The high firing rate capability of semiautomatic paintball guns has necessitated the use of bulk loader devices in conjunction with such guns.
In a conventional form thereof, a bulk loader device typically comprises a housing which is positioned above and to one side of the gun. The housing is adapted to internally store a relatively large quantity of paintballs (for example 100-200 paintballs) and has a bottom outlet openinq through which the stored paintballs can sequentially drop. Connected to the housing over its bottom outlet opening, and extending downwardly therefrom, is a feed tube that is connectable to the gun's hollow infeed portion--typically a hollow elbow member projecting outwardly from the body of the gun.
During normal operation of the loader, paintballs dropped through its housing outlet opening form a paintball stack, within the feed tube and gun infeed elbow, that is gravity fed to the gun during firing thereof and replenished at its top end from the loader housing. Paintball jams intermittently occur within the loader housing, above its outlet housing, during firing of the gun. These jams prevent the normal gravity delivery of paintballs downwardly through the housing outlet opening, with the result that the paintball stack can be totally depleted by several shots of the gun.
In the past, clearing of such jams has required that the gun be forcibly shaken to dislodge the paintballs causing the jam within the loader housing. This, of course, is highly undesirable since it interrupts the proper aiming of the gun and, of course, correspondingly interrupts the gun user's ability to continue the rapid firing of the gun. In view of this jamming problem typically associated with paintball guns provided with conventional bulk loader devices, it is an object of the present invention to provide a bulk loader device that overcomes or at least substantially reduces this jamming problem.